Director's cut

A patriarchal domain few years ago, Kolkata theatre is opening up in recent times. Till the other day, women were merely actors in group theatres. Only a few took up organisational batons. But things are changing, both in Bengali and English theatre, as women are increasingly taking centre stage. This new generation of women directors is handling political themes with élan and demystifying Tagore’s classics with panache. Read on.

ABANTI CHAKRABORTY

Abanti Chakraborty Abanti Chakraborty, 30, was initiated into theatre in her early teens when her father brought a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was an early favourite, Sophocles was an obsession later. Chakraborty did not consider theatre as a career option till she was in Hyderabad Central University where Marathi director Bhaskar Shivalkar, a faculty member there, introduced her to the aesthetics of stage. Within two years she was playing the female lead in Anant Kulkarni’s Aarop. Returning to Kolkata, she acted in productions like Arghya’s Simar. But she had other intentions. “I always had an instinct for direction.” She made her directorial debut in 2003 with a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring hearing-impaired children from a Hyderabad school. Tatri followed the following year.

Now she is working with a group, Aarshi, directing classic European and American texts. Her interpretations of Euripides’s Medea, Ibsen’s Doll’s House and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra have been well-received. She also dreams of presenting Iliad on stage. “I want to do the epic in eight hours in the line of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” Chakraborty says.

TRINA NILEENA BANERJEE

Trina Nileena Banerjee As a small girl, Trina Nileena Banerjee, 26, nourished a strong resentment towards theatre. Her parents Salil and Arundhati Bandyopadhyay were busy actors on stage, finding little time for their child. “I grew up feeling I’d never be a part of theatre,” says Banerjee.

By the time she was twelve, that resentment had turned into ambiguity. It was then that her father told her to replace an actor in the Theatron production of Khelaghar and she obliged. The character was required to cry in a scene, while thinking about her father. During the second show at Girish Mancha, she felt someone in the audience was sobbing alongside. Another lady was wiping off tears. “That’s when it struck me that ‘I can do this’,” Banerjee recalls, adding, “It’s like getting the taste of blood; you can’t give it up!”

While studying in Loreto College she debuted as a director with a Chekov play. “I realised that I directed better than act,” she says. In 2003, while she was a student of Jadavpur University, she directed Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It was quite well-received. Banerjee subsequently went to Oxford for two years. Returning home in 2006, she directed selected scenes from two of Tennessee Williams plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Having found a foothold in the English language theatre scene, Banerjee was willing to reach out to a wider audience. She directed Mitrapuran, a Vijay Tendulkar play translated by her father for Theatron in 2007. For a woman whose maiden film role in Jahar Kanungo’s Nisshabd bagged her a best actress award in the 7th Osian Film Festival, acting is always a career option.

At present a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Banerjee has begun working on a production of Raktakarabi. “I need a new setting for the play as I visualise a prison or an asylum every time I consider this Tagore text,” Banerjee says.

ARPITA GHOSH

Arpita Ghosh It may sound incredible but until a decade ago Arpita Ghosh, 40, hardly had any first hand feel of the performing arena. As a student of Scottish Church College in the mid-1980s, she was fascinated by the histrionic skills of Saoli Mitra in the legendary Nathabati Anathabat, a Pancham Vaidic production. Till then theatre was a passing interest for her. Ghosh took theatre seriously in 1998 when she joined Fourth Wall. Within two years came the major break. She got admitted to ‘Charyashram’, the one-yearlong theatre course run by Pancham Vaidic. Within years, Ghosh was acting, writing and directing Pancham Vaidic productions with Saoli Mitra as her guardian angel.

In 2003, Ghosh made her directorial debut with two productions—a dramatised version of Sukumar Ray’s Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La and the one-act Antargata Agun. The next year, she essayed the lead role in Rajnoitik Hatya, a translation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Crime Passionnel directed by Mitra. The mentor and the protégé came together in a 2005 production of Chandali based on a Tagore text. But it was Poshu Khamar, a dramatisation of George Orwell's anti-totalitarian novel Animal Farm, that established Ghosh as a major force in contemporary Bengali theatre. The production created quite a stir in the wake of the government policy for acquisition of farmlands for industry. Recently she has translated, dramatised and directed Tokolosh, based on a Ronald Segal work. Although she always zeroed in on foreign texts, Ghosh is busy scripting Tagore’s Ghare Baire now. “I find this novel very contemporary in this political scenario. The phenomenon of rabble-rousing deserves a dissection at this hour,” she says, adding, “We need to relook at the days of Swadeshi to understand what went on wrong with independent India.”

ADRIJA DASGUPTA

Adrija Dasgupta In 1986, the Indian People’s Theatre Association nurtured the dramatic potential of Adrija Dasgupta, 40. She played the role of the wife of scientist Otto Hann in a production called Biswasghatak.The newcomer enjoyed the experience. Yet theatre took a backseat until she enrolled in the Drama department of Rabindra Bharati University in 1992. She participated in suburban theatre productions before entering the National School of Drama in 1995. In Kolkata, she played the lead in Bibhas Chakraborty’s Madhab Malanchi Kainya. But acting was not her calling.

Conducting theatre workshops for youngsters was easier. Dasgupta got associated with groups like Sudrak and Ebang Ekalabya. She formed her group Uhini in 2003 and her maiden directorial venture Bijalibalar Mukti-Ekti Manabik Khonjin, based on a Moti Nandy novel, premiered in 2004. Two years later, Dasgupta directed Dure Baje and Tumi Daak Diyechho Kon Sakale. The latter was based on the life and career of Keya Chakraborty, one of the leading actresses in the 1960s and 70s and unleashed the feminist streak in her works. She now also directs children’s plays for Kolkata and Agartala groups.

SHUKTARA LAL

Shuktara Lal Theatre happened accidentally for Shuktara Lal, 26. Every year her father, drama critic Ananda Lal, took her to the annual drama festival hosted by the British Council. The little girl used to be in awe of the schools’ performances. A year before sitting for her ISC examinations, she and two of her classmates at G.D. Birla Centre for Education wrote an original script for the competition. “We won the first prize for that,” Lal smiles.

While in Jadavpur University, Lal participated in all her father’s productions. She also acted in the Theatrician production of Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana. But when friend Trina Nileena Banerjee donned the director’s cap, Lal gave a serious thought to direction. Exhaustive reading of world drama came handy. She felt it appropriate to direct Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. “I liked directing,” she says. It also made her realise that little is being done with Indian texts. For her next production with Theatrician in 2006, Lal chose Asif Currimbhoy’s Goa, keeping the issues relating to contemporary India in mind. Within months of premiering Goa, Lal went to New York to pursue her Masters in Performance Studies. Since her return last summer, she has been working with Sanved on how theatre can be used for rehabilitation and empowerment of abused women. A research on the politics of Manipur is also on the cards. On the production front, Lal is keen to stage a bi-lingual production of Tagore’s Arupratan this year. She wants to bridge the insular divides separating Bengali, English and Hindi theatre audience in Kolkata.